Mechanical harvesting equipment has been widely available for harvesting agricultural products such as corn, beans, grain, cotton and the like. However, for harvesting easily bruised agricultural products (such as peppers), mechanized harvesters have not been entirely satisfactory. Consequently, the harvesting of such products is still being performed largely by means of manual labor (which is very costly and time consuming). A mechanical harvester is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,287,687, incorporated herein by reference. The present invention provides improvements to such harvester.